Is anyone here running pipewire-pulse successfully? I have a bunch of apps that expect PulseAudio to be present, but no matter what I tried (appx. half a year ago), I could not get any output from pipewire-pulse. Has this improved?
I've been running openSUSE Tumbleweed on my desktop (nothing fancy though for audio), and at some point last year (July perhaps), an update removed pulseaudio and installed pipewire. If I hadn't been paying attention I wouldn't have noticed. It was a seamless drop in replacement. Everything works at least as good as it did with pulseaudio. I still use pavucontrol and some other pulseaudio stuff and it just works with no issues with pipewire-pulse.
I switched to pipewire from plain ALSA last year and configured pipewire-pulse because there was one game I wanted to play which insisted on PulseAudio. I got audio to work for that particular game but since I don't need pipewire-pulse for anything else I likely won't notice if it breaks. I found the documentation lacking and configuration difficult, but it's still early days for pipewire and it is clearly an improvement over ALSA.
Are you referring to their libpulse reimplementation? Because if so, that one got sacked a while back because they could not iron out the kinks. These days, PipeWire implements the PulseAudio server API directly, and this part is working absolutely perfectly for me. I'm even using pavucontrol to configure my PipeWire device profiles.
UPDATE: I tried it on my laptop and everything worked with zero configuration. Either whatever bug I encountered last time was specific to my desktop or has since been fixed. Especially Bluetooth is now unbelievably seamless - 1000x better than Windows and on par with Android.
I would have thought most linux users are, since most mixers (plasma, gnome, etc.) afaik haven't been ported to pipewire? My experience was that installing pipewire-pulse (and, removing pulseaudio) caused my mixer to continue to JustWork.
What distro are you using? Switching was trivial for me. Pipewire exposes the same API as pulseaudio, so nothing was really impacted.
You have to go in and change some config files or it won't work by default. Wasn't clear to me either at first.